Re-learning productive discomfort

idk v3.0 🤷🏻‍♂️ — and updates on what else has been going on.

Hello, friends!

tl;dr: Have you noticed that you’re stuck because so much in life is uncertain ... and the uncertainty is so uncomfortable that it stops you from taking action? If so, you may be out of practice with being productively uncomfortable. idk is a training tool for productive discomfort that is designed to help you get unstuck.

I write to you from the remote and depopulated mountain in south-eastern France to which I have temporarily escaped. I’ve been working on a bunch of things (possibly too many) since I last sent out a newsletter 10 months ago. The first to reach semi-completion is idk, a training tool for productive discomfort that anyone can benefit from — though the people who like it best seem to be in venture capital, private equity, tech startups, restaurants, and creative services.

But: Why is productive discomfort important? And how does idk develop the ability to be productively uncomfortable? Read on to find out — or skip the explanation and visit www.productivediscomfort.org to buy idk immediately (it ships worldwide).

This is idk v3.0.

Being stuck — and getting unstuck

Many people I know are feeling stuck (which I’m quite sure is related to languishing), and the feeling has been amplified by the waves of uncertainty that have been washing over us. Figuring out how to get unstuck is not intuitive. idk is partly a result of some personal observations that came into sharp focus in the last 18 months:

1. Uncertainty about the future is unavoidable,

2. Uncertainty often stops me from taking action that I know, cognitively, is likely to be beneficial,

3. But the actual blocker to action is a visceral, emotional discomfort with not-knowing what to do and how to do it,

4. When I get over the block — after somehow unsticking myself — and do the action, it is both usually beneficial and the discomfort usually overestimated, and

5. The more often I manage to unstick myself and act despite being uncomfortable with not-knowing how the action will turn out, the easier it is to unstick myself in the future.

Why be uncomfortable?

I realised that actively seeking out discomfort may seem counterintuitive but actually isn’t. Being uncomfortable is essential for learning, growth, and innovation, and is unavoidable in uncertainty. Being able to function in spite of discomfort is essential for flourishing in an increasingly uncertain world.

The problem is: We instinctively avoid discomfort because it’s viscerally unpleasant.

As children, discomfort is an unavoidable part of everyday life. Being put in uncomfortable situations is part of how we all learn and we get used to it. By the time we become adults, this is rarely the case. We’ve designed modern society around reducing discomfort. The more successful we are as adults, the better we are at avoiding discomfort and the less comfortable we become with being uncomfortable.

The more we avoid discomfort, the less we develop mindsets and habits for dealing with discomfort productively. The less experienced we are with dealing with discomfort productively, the more likely we are to be paralysed when exposed to uncomfortable situations. This is how and why we get stuck when faced with uncertainty.

This is a vicious cycle.

idk breaks this vicious cycle by helping you re-learn how to be productively uncomfortable. idk prompts you to take actions that create discomfort specifically designed for learning and growth while avoiding actions that are so uncomfortable that you’re paralysed. This is the sweet spot of productive discomfort.

How does idk work?

Each idk card (there are 53 in total) offers an action prompt. If you choose to take the action, you’ll be exposed to a novel situation or perspective. These actions are specifically designed to be uncomfortable in ways that stimulate various forms of learning and growth.

Some idk prompt cards.

Many of the idk actions may seem trivial. This is by design: discomfort has important cognitive effects (learning/growth/innovation) but discomfort-avoidance has affective causes (the instinctive urge to avoid the viscerally unpleasant feeling of being uncomfortable). Re-learning how to be uncomfortable has got to start with trivial-seeming actions which give rise to surmountable levels of visceral unease. This is the equivalent of learning to walk before you learn to run.

Learning how to be productively uncomfortable requires going a step further and associating the feeling of discomfort with growth by designing the uncomfortable action around learning and discovery. With repetition, this weakens the instinctive linkage between discomfort and fear and avoidance — and makes it easier to develop the habit of seeking out productively uncomfortable situations.

idk works by gradually habituating you to the feeling of being uncomfortable and associating that feeling with desirable outcomes.

idk and the uncertainty mindset

Earlier this year, I released idk v1.0 and v2.0. Having finally found a fulfilment partner, and slightly improved the deck design, idk v3.0 is now shipping internationally from warehouses in the US and Germany. You can order idk at www.productivediscomfort.org.

idk emerged out of observing how some of the best innovation teams in the world trained themselves to become progressively better at doing difficult, unfamiliar things … by embracing uncertainty. You can read more about how they did this in my book, The Uncertainty Mindset.

What else has been going on?

This year, I’ve done more uncertainty-focused strategy work than before. A lot of it has been with not-for-profits and the public sector, including

• adaptation planning for Region Skåne in Sweden,

• a talk for Staatslabor, the Swiss Public Innovation Lab, on uncertainty, innovation, and adaptation for government agencies (video and transcript here),

• my ongoing involvement as an executive board member for Rethink Food,

• advising the Wellcome Collection on diversity and inclusion, and

• some emergent work with the governments of a city and federation of municipalities in France.

I’ve also been doing this kind of strategy work with businesses, which is something like implementing idk at an organizational level. It seems particularly useful right now to help leaders and organizations learn how to take action despite the discomfort of uncertainty — I’d like to do more of it.

With a team from University College London’s School of Management, I’ve been working on a 6-part podcast. In each episode, I talk to one of our researchers about emerging issues and new ways of thinking that affect the business landscape. Some of the topics include cryptocurrencies and ideas of sovereignty, healthcare in the context of complexity, and multisided platform dynamics. The first episode came out this week and is on the future of cities and urban sustainability.

But the things I’ve got going which are hardest to describe have to do with rural multi-use development, decentralized token-based litigation finance, and seasonal water. (Not at the same time.) None of these projects is baked enough to write about yet — soon, I hope.

Meanwhile, here on the mountain in the middle of nowhere, it is still sun and blue sky by day but the nights turn cold and the mornings are frosty. I’ll leave you with some of the cattle hanging out in the next-door field and a large fried cèpe which I found (not yet fried) after accidentally falling into an otherwise inaccessible little valley.

Cows.

A cèpe, sliced and fried slowly in olive oil.

That’s a wrap.

🌯

Hello friends and happy new year! (🤞)

This issue is about four things:

1. A wrap-up of Year One of this newsletter: https://uncertaintymindset.org/UM1/

2. Crass commercialism: Buy my book! You can do this easily online and offline, around the world. It’s about how to think about and thrive in uncertain times—like the times we’re in right now. There are worldwide buying links here, and some recent reviews and podcasts about it (see below).

3. Year Two of the newsletter,

4. A preview of idk, a new project which I hope will be ready to share soon.

For a little bit more about each one of these four things, read on …

---

Wrapping up Year One

Over the last two months, I thought about writing a wrap-up issue or a year-end recap. But, prompted by emails from backlogged subscribers and design thinkers, I eventually did something else.

My wrap-up project for the holiday break is a set of pages which collectively provide a hacky way to navigate all 52 issues via whatever combination you would like of

1. Short summaries of each issue for the backlogged,

2. My idea of cool topics across issues for those who want a conceptual overlay,

3. Links between issues and topics,

4. Links between topics and other topics,

5. Links between issues and other issues.

It has many elements of what people have taken to calling digital gardens and it took a lot longer than I expected (there’s an implementation note, if you care).

The process of putting this together was fascinating in terms of a) discovering unexpected patterns across a year of writing and b) thinking practically about building non-linear vats of information that can be navigated in different ways.

In the end this wrap-up project turned out to touch two areas of long-standing personal interest:

1. Bidirectional linking in networks where nodes are differently typed,

2. Semistructuring data. Indexing my own book was an object lesson on this, and in #11, I wrote: “Indexing is turning a book inside-out to reveal its skeleton and make explicit the logical structure of ideas on which it is built. Being able to keep this structure aloft and in view (metaphorically) while reading and annotating a manuscript and adding to the structure is a skill that takes a long time to acquire.”

Anyway. Here’s the link to the wrap-up again: https://uncertaintymindset.org/UM1/

I hope you like it (because it took a really fucking long time 🛌). And if you find broken links, please email me.

---

Crass commercialism

Now that the season of socially conditioned consumption is over, I feel slightly less tawdry about pushing my book: you should read it!

It’s about why risk is not the same as uncertainty and—very relevant right now, let’s be real—how to cope with and possibly even thrive under uncertainty. And about cooking and other fun stuff.

There’s more information (and buying resources for every region of the world) on the book’s website: https://uncertaintymindset.org/

Since October 2020, there have been reviews of The Uncertainty Mindset in the Times Literary Supplement and Strategy + Business, and a hard-to-categorise response to the book by Andy Matuschak. I’ve also done three surprisingly different podcasts about the organizational ideas in the book and about risk vs. uncertainty, with Beyond Wealth, Building Bridges, and the Wicked Podcast.

If you like the book, I’d appreciate it if you leave a review somewhere and let me know.

---

Year Two

Over the 70 days between the last issue and this one, I reflected on the first newsletter year. Even the pretty loose single topic focus on uncertainty was overly constraining. And the weekly schedule was too much—for everyone.

Year Two is still a work in progress, but here’s what I’m thinking:

1. It’s time for a different name,

2. There will be no singular topic focus,

3. Issues will come out approximately biweekly,

4. Some issues will be work-in-progress on two new projects—Quality Time and Productive Discomfort—which I hope will eventually become books,

5. Some posts may combine audio and text content,

6. There might be a paid content option (email me if you have thoughts about this).

I’ll continue to write sporadically here but Year Two will begin in February and run on a different Substack account for boring administrative reasons. You’ll receive Year Two automatically if you’re currently signed up for this newsletter on Substack. (And if you’re not currently signed up👇)

---

A cryptic preview

I’ve been working on idk for a few months and hope it will be ready to share in February. This is part of what it’ll look like:

More in a few weeks 🤞.

🌴🚚🌯

---

The Uncertainty Mindset is hard to categorize and probably not for everyone. But if you know people who might enjoy it, please share it with them.

You can find me on the web at www.vaughntan.org, on Twitter @vaughn_tan, on Instagram @vaughn.tan, or by email at <uncertaintymindset@vaughntan.org>. You can also find out more about my book at www.uncertaintymindset.org.

#52: A year and change

A report on an experiment in self-therapy.

I’m Vaughn Tan; this is another of my weekly attempts to make sense of the state of not-knowing. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.

My first book, The Uncertainty Mindset, is a behind-the-scenes look at cutting-edge high-end cuisine … and what it can teach us about designing organizations to be more adaptable and innovative. You can get it here. If you like it, help me out by leaving a review somewhere. Book events are coming soon—tell me what you’d like to see and sign up for notifications here.

tl; dr: Writing a weekly newsletter was hard at first, then got easier—and made me more comfortable with thinking and writing in public, for people I don’t already know. I’m taking some time off to think about what Year 2 of this newsletter will be. Email me if you have ideas (contact details at the end).   

Early last October, I saw a very old friend who was visiting London. She reminded me that I used to write more frequently, and pieces that were shorter, more casual, sometimes even funny. And more interesting and enjoyable to read.

I take criticism well but that sure was brutal. Especially on the eighth glass.

The next day, while hydrating aggressively, I traced the change in my writing practice … to starting graduate school in organizational behavior in 2008.

Jim Harrison’s observations on dropping out of graduate school are relevant here: “By the next day at lunch, Kant and Wittgenstein had dissolved in the marinara on the fifty-cent spaghetti plate at Romeo's. I returned to Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Char for wisdom, abandoning forever the academic pursuit of trying to answer questions that no one ever asks” (from “Principles” in The Raw and the Cooked).

The point of graduate school is to break students down to rebuild them. The rebuilding is about teaching them a new way to think. A large part of that is teaching them a new way to communicate ideas—teaching them a new way to write.

In the battlefields of academic thought, ideas must be armed and armored to survive and conquer. They cannot be allowed into the wild without being made invulnerable through successive and arduous rounds of refinement. There’s no room for writing filled with half-baked thought experiments or speculative observations.

This way of writing seems to produce turgid prose stuffed with rebarbative theorizing—it may also do something to thinking. In any case, after over a decade of learning how to think and write for academics, writing speculatively and loosely was incredibly daunting. Ingrained habits of thinking had to be broken and new ones built.

Around the same time last October, I exchanged a longish series of emails with another friend. He’s been thinking in public for well over a decade on Twitter and a blog of longform writing. (In fact, I know him through his blog.) His advice: build a forcing function for producing high-frequency, short-form experimental writing. And make it as friction-free as possible to have no excuses for not delivering. Essentially, he told me to start a weekly newsletter on Substack.

In my book, I describe how some innovation teams force themselves to do important work which is often avoided because it’s uncomfortable. They do it by inducing a sense of controlled panic from committing to work that is beyond their current ability—I call this desperation by design.

Desperation forces teams and people to dismantle old, comfortable ways of working and learn new ones, pushing them to fail along the way in order to learn.

But desperation isn’t always beneficial. The key considerations in designing productive desperation are to (1) commit to the project publicly and irrevocably, (2) give yourself definite deadlines for delivery, and (3) ensure that failing to deliver has real consequences.

So, to eat my own dog food, I announced this newsletter to practically everyone I knew (1) including many people whose opinions of me are professionally important (3), and committed to a sending out an issue every week (2). The objectives were to force myself to write more frequently and for an unknown, emergent audience, explore more ideas by being willing to explore them only part-way, and to learn how to be comfortable with showing thought- and work-in-progress.

What resulted from this comparatively trivial experiment in self-therapy?

52 weeks later, I haven’t missed an issue and I’ve only sent a handful of late ones. At the beginning, I began drafting each issue immediately after sending the previous one out. It took days to write and rewrite, and the results felt contrived. But as with any regular practice, routine made the work easier. It’s now easy to feel comfortable with starting work on each issue a day or two before it goes out, and to use the newsletter to truly noodle on a half-formed idea that may go no further … or that might expand into a series of issues. There’s enormous freedom in being able to write about anything in particular without it having to necessarily be Significant or Weighty.

I can now also write in public and for an unknown audience with comparative ease. This newsletter demonstrates how short the half-life of the public idea is. Good ideas barely survive, boring ideas die or hibernate unlamented. The adverse consequences of public thinking and writing are trivial, so logically it is better to share more ideas with more people in more forums. Since most people don’t care anyway, there’s no obstacle to not knowing who you’re writing for. But being comfortable writing for an unknown audience is not the same as not caring about the audience. On the contrary, in writing for an unknown audience, I’ve had to pay even more attention to writing clearly, simply, and without jargon.

In any case, I’ve taken a year to learn how to write without feeling like I had to write perfectly. Now, I’m going to take an unpredictable amount of time off to figure out what the next year of this newsletter will be.

The name will probably change. The focus certainly will. It might involve investigations of ideas that are even harder to categorize. It might happen more or less frequently. It might involve audio or video.

Get in touch if you have thoughts about what you’d like to see in Year 2.

Springwater, 1971.

From the field: Photos of everyday work in culinary R&D teams, selected from thousands I took during fieldwork.

Improving processes behind the scenes (at ThinkFoodTank, 2010).

Prototyping a smut-inspired dessert (at Amaja, 2011).

Debriefing (at the Cooking Lab, 2012).

Bonuses:

1. Last week’s issue was about how some food industry businesses have made themselves both more sustainable and more resilient. It was based on a panel featuring Ben Chapman and Mike Harrison (Super 8), Matt Jozwiak (Rethink Food), and Nick Kokonas (Alinea Group/Tock). The video’s now up on Youtube:

2. This week, instead of doing Significant and Weighty work, I have been watching Yumeiro Pâtissière—I blame Andrea Francke for this development. Like Yakitate!!! Japan, there’s more content in here than is immediately apparent.

3. What makes things last a long time? Alexander Rose at the Long Now Foundation offers a way to frame the answer (video; transcript).

By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorize and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.

Find me on the web at www.vaughntan.org, on Twitter @vaughn_tan, on Instagram @vaughn.tan, or by email at <uncertaintymindset@vaughntan.org>. You can also find out more about my book at www.uncertaintymindset.org.

#51: The sensible approach

How resilience is a side-effect of building sustainable business models.

I’m Vaughn Tan; this is another of my weekly attempts to make sense of the state of not-knowing. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.

My first book, The Uncertainty Mindset, is a behind-the-scenes look at cutting-edge high-end cuisine … and what it can teach us about designing organizations to be more adaptable and innovative. You can get it here. If you like it, help me out by leaving a review somewhere. Book events are coming soon—tell me what you’d like to see and sign up for notifications here.

Hello again, friends,

tl;dr: Why do so few businesses recognize how sensible it is to build business models that are both more sustainable (in the broad sense of the word) and also more resilient to uncertainty? 

Resilience is being able to either tolerate change or change quickly when conditions demand it.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been putting together a panel to talk about resilient business models for the food industry. I was fortunate to get Ben Chapman and Mike Harrison from Super 8 (Brat, Kiln, and Smoking Goat), Matt Jozwiak from Rethink Food, and Nick Kokonas from The Alinea Group to join me. We recorded the panel yesterday and you can see it this Saturday (10/24) at noon US Eastern (5pm UK) as part of WRLDCTY— I’ll post the video next week too.

Our discussion yesterday illustrates how building assets that allow businesses to adapt in uncertain times almost always looks like leaving money on the table.

Super 8, Rethink Food, and Alinea Group represent three superficially different approaches to running food businesses.

• Super 8 operates a group of quite different restaurants that has invested in long-term cross-restaurant direct buying relationships with growers and producers.

• Rethink Food is building and scaling up (by replication) a small restaurant business model anchored on reducing food waste and increasing community access to food. (Rethink Food is a not-for-profit that, fortunately, tries to run itself as a business—I’m on the executive board.)

• Alinea Group developed an in-house system for owning and managing customer relationship data across its restaurants.

These differences are only superficial, though. All three are intentionally leaving money on the table in ways that make them more long-term sustainable, more resilient businesses. Each of these businesses invested in doing things which were either “unnecessary” or “impossible” because they seemed worth doing at the time:

• Super 8 wanted to get access to better product by working directly with growers.

• Rethink Food wanted to give restaurants a business model that would allow them to stay operational (and thus preserve employment) while also reducing food waste and supplying food to community organizations that needed it.

• Alinea Group wanted to have more detailed insight into its customers across its groups than existing booking systems could provide.

These supposedly unnecessary or impossible things were hard to do but inherently worthwhile—they were neither unnecessary nor impossible:

• Super 8’s willingness to commit to long-term buying and to pre-payment means that they get extraordinarily good product that wouldn’t otherwise be available.

• Rethink Food’s partnerships with local restaurants allowed them to produce meals that were higher quality and more culturally appropriate meals than were possible with its previous commissary model.

• Alinea Group was able to spin out its customer relationship management tool into a successful company (Tock, the cloud reservations management system).

But there was an unexpected benefit from doing these things that were worth doing anyway: they made each business more sustainable and resilient:

• Long-term relationships and prepayment are desirable for growers, who now offer very favorable pricing to Super 8. This allows the restaurant group to produce high-quality food while charging customers unexpectedly low prices for it. Super 8’s restaurants offer great value, and this has led to sustained customer loyalty, crucial both now (with restrictions on movement and dining times) and into the future.

• Rethink’s move to a distributed, partner-oriented model allowed it to continue to operate through the pandemic restrictions and will probably let it scale across the US both more easily and in a more context-specific way.

• Alinea Group’s long-standing investment in managing customer relationships in-house allowed it to quickly and inexpensively reach its customers with appropriate new takeaway offerings. They were tracking pre-pandemic revenues within 2-3 weeks of changing their product offerings and reached record revenues during the pandemic lockdown.

When Ben, Mike, Matt, and Nick talk about what their businesses are doing, it seems patently obvious that everyone in the food industry should be rushing to move in the same direction. But only a handful are doing this. Why do so few businesses recognize how sensible it is to build business models that are both more sustainable (in the broad sense of the word) and also more resilient to uncertainty?

In fact, it is not so hard to understand why so few businesses are choosing to do the right thing in ways that also make them more resilient. The usual answer is lack of financial or physical resources. It’s true that being resilient is easier with, for instance, lots of cash in the bank.

But probably the real obstacle is mindset and approach. A fundamental requirement for resilience is being willing to admit that how things are currently done isn’t the only way they can be done—and to act on that admission. In turn, this requires pragmatic imagination and a willingness to embrace uncertainty: remaining grounded in reality while trying to conceive of and build something that doesn’t exist yet, which others may say is either unnecessary or impossible.

I suppose most businesses just don’t have what it takes.

I could be wrong.

Bonuses:

1. Laetitia’s article about innovation lessons from the frontiers of food is now also in English.

2. Lost on the internet.

Photos from the field: Until Issue #52, each week I’ll include some photos of everyday work in culinary R&D teams, selected from thousands I took during fieldwork.

Rescuing a sauce from ignominy (at Amaja, 2011)

Fixing a quality problem with the White Rabbit’s watch (at the Fat Duck, 2011).

Trying a little beet snack (at ThinkFoodTank, 2010).

By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorize and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.

Find me on the web at www.vaughntan.org, on Twitter @vaughn_tan, on Instagram @vaughn.tan, or by email at <uncertaintymindset@vaughntan.org>. You can also find out more about my book at www.uncertaintymindset.org.

#50: Leaving money on the table

Building assets to prepare for uncertain times.

I’m Vaughn Tan; this is another of my weekly attempts to make sense of the state of not-knowing. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.

My first book, The Uncertainty Mindset, is a behind-the-scenes look at cutting-edge high-end cuisine … and what it can teach us about designing organizations to be more adaptable and innovative. You can get it here. If you like it, help me out by leaving a review somewhere. Book events are coming soon—tell me what you’d like to see and sign up for notifications here.

Hello again, friends,

tl;dr: Operating responsibly seems inefficient but actually creates the system-level, polyvalent resource businesses need to adapt and survive in uncertain times. 

One motif of this newsletter is that being prepared to deal with uncertainty requires tolerating what appears to be inefficiency. Another way to say it is: being ready for uncertainty is naturally opposed to always being optimized. Yet another way to say it is: super-optimized systems are fragile.

Operating responsibly—which inevitably means constraining action—always seems like something which reduces a business’s freedom to do whatever it takes to Make More Profit. At base, responsible business is equitable; it’s fair to the counterparty. It means, among other things, not overcharging the customer, giving the employee a reasonable or even generous salary, and not underpaying the supplier.

As a business, being fair to consumers, employees, and suppliers even when not forced to by consumer or employment law, or by supplier market power, seems like leaving money on the table. So doing business responsibly seems only tolerable in stable, superabundant times when there is so much comfort and money to go around that it’s ok to leave some it for others.

In fact, the opposite is true.

“Unnecessarily” responsible behavior creates intertemporal reciprocity between the business and those it is responsible to. This is a resource that can be drawn on in time of need—as hundreds of childrens’ books and parables have illustrated.

Employees, customers, and suppliers who have been treated fairly are more likely to be flexible when the business needs them to be. They are more likely to work harder, and to take on unpredictable and changing roles. They are more likely to buy out of loyalty even when they have no need to, or when the product available is new and unfamiliar. They are more likely to extend credit, supply at short notice, reduce minimum order quantities, or rush a delivery. This is system-level flexibility; it comes from both inside the business (the employees) and the environment outside the business (the customers and suppliers).

Responsibly treated employees, customers, and suppliers usually repay the favor by doing what a business needs at the moment, even if what that is could not have been defined in advance.

System-level flexibility is not a conventionally understood resource or capability, like having a lot of spare cash in the bank or a workforce trained to manufacture a particular widget. It’s a different type of resource, one that allows the business the freedom to change what it does when it needs to.

Operating responsibly appears inefficient but in fact produces a multipurpose resource: system-level flexibility which has no specific predefined form or function but instead transforms to be whatever is useful when the need arises. This is a polyvalent asset that makes a business more resilient and adaptable—operating responsibly is more, not less, important in uncertain times.

There's nothing to it.

Bonuses:

1. A really nice article by Laetitia Vitaud about innovation lessons from the frontiers of food (in French).

2. Tim Hwang’s Trade Journal Cooperative sends you an extremely specific industry journal each month.

3. The Yuru-Chara Grand Prix.

Photos from the field: Until Issue #52, each week I’ll post some photos of everyday work in culinary R&D teams, selected from thousands I took during fieldwork.

Pre-opening Haribo-fueled late night work session (at ThinkFoodTank, 2010).

Really, really old clams (at Amaja, 2011).

Precision caramelization (at the Cooking Lab, 2012).

By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorize and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.

Find me on the web at www.vaughntan.org, on Twitter @vaughn_tan, on Instagram @vaughn.tan, or by email at <uncertaintymindset@vaughntan.org>. You can also find out more about my book at www.uncertaintymindset.org.